Wei Shao
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Deep Sleep at
Terminal Three
Like a bandage between her teeth.
A boarding pass. Now is hers, not hers.
A white flax bag of clothing + shoes, home-made.
Provincial airport → National airport → International Destiny
Like being born again in rags: Words collapsed on her lips
Finally, she knew that she could never have enough
The last time she went to the riverbank = dropped her amethyst
ring a fish nods its head & with it = swims away
Disappearing and reappearing = Where did her four days go?
Time lost = lost words. Such a fortune
Is there anything longer than distance?
Unbendable parallel chopsticks
She was given five oranges to make new friends,
Laughably old way Home.
In memory, she rode once more with her bamboo stick
Not Li Po’s the River Merchant’s wife.
Waiting was not an option,
you see? She saw.
Remember? = Remembered
Remember = Remembering not?
Border and borderless, the drifting orange flavor was hers.
Go or not to go.
Call it the wall… the gate too … a digital message
She left her cloth shoes on the winter riverbank.
Terminal Three – Dream of dreams
Shao Wei came to the United States in 1996 and was raised near the Yangtze River in China. She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and an M.F.A from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. She earned her Ph.D. in CW from UT Dallas in 2015. Her accolades include a 2002 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, etc. She authorizes the poetry collection Pulling a Dragon’s Teeth and Homeland (Chinese version).